The Foreign Policy journal has an excellent top ten list for 02008. Top ten worst predictions. This type of accountability is exactly why we started Long Bets. Excerpts below:

“[A]nyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of ‘recession.’” —Donald Luskin, The Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2008

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org regarding the Large Hadron Collider

Peter

isn’t the LHC down right now?

Indulis

Actually the LHC has not been run up to where it could (in the minds of the doomsayers) become dangerous. To draw an analogy, the car has been started and the motor checked to see that it was working, but has not been driven yet.

PS I do not agree with the doomsayers but the “death of the prediction of doom” is not valid

Reader

Nice to see that two of the top 10 are prominent neocons – William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

If you want to see some really funny stuff, look at some of the Iraq war predictions from before March 2003.